


Turn Me Off, Turn Me Over, Turn Me Upside Down (the Right Above It Remix)

by ariadnes_string



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: First Time, M/M, Sleepy Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-02
Updated: 2014-05-02
Packaged: 2018-01-21 16:13:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1556393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariadnes_string/pseuds/ariadnes_string
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock had the most absurd desire to come to John clean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Turn Me Off, Turn Me Over, Turn Me Upside Down (the Right Above It Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mific](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mific/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Turn Me Off](https://archiveofourown.org/works/173965) by [mific](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mific/pseuds/mific). 



> Thank you, mific, for offering up your wonderful stories for remixing! I love the original of this--I hope you don't mind what I've done with it too much.

Sherlock stared long and hard at the syringe and the packet of white powder, remembering the burn, and the release. Stared in his mind’s eye, of course; there was no paraphernalia in the flat these days. He sized up a bottle of vodka in the same fashion. It might be easy, under the influence. People had sex while they were drunk or high all the time. It might even be the most common way to go about it, if the evidence of nighttime London was anything to go on. 

And yet, he had the most absurd desire to come to John clean. 

Clean of elicit substances, that is, but not wholly in possession of his faculties.

It took him far longer than it should have to figure something out.

*

There was a moment when Sherlock thought that pain would do the trick.

Something had left a deep gash in his bicep, cutting through both coat and shirt. He wasn’t sure what—a jutting pipe or spar encountered in their mad dash across the building site. He didn’t feel it. It took him a moment or two to realize that John was holding his arm to staunch the blood, and not just restraining him from interfering with the Met’s collar.

“Come on,” John said. “They’ve got it from here. I can patch you up back at the flat.”

It was only when Sherlock was sat at the kitchen table, stripped to his vest, with John leaning over him, experimentally pulling closed the edges of the wound, that the pain blossomed.

It rolled through his body and his mind, blanketing some things and revealing others. He felt, more sharply than he had before, the warmth of John’s body and the tensile strength of John’s fingers on his arm. John’s scent of damp wool and adrenaline-tinged sweat washed over him. 

Sherlock gasped.

“Sorry,” John said, alarmed. “The topical will kick in a minute, but I can give you something stronger if you like.”

Sherlock shook his head. John could feel the thing between them, too, he could tell. There was a faint uncharacteristic husk to John’s voice, the slightest hesitation. His eyes were dilated more than they should have been for the level of light in the room.

They were so close that were Sherlock to arch his back to his full height, and incline his head just so, or, better yet, use his good arm to grip John’s shoulder and pull him down, they might easily— 

Then, with surprising suddenness, the anesthetic took effect. The pain dropped away like an ebb tide. In its wake, John’s breathing, still a fraction too fast, rasped overloud against Sherlock’s ear. The sound reminded him of their quarry, and the man’s suspiciously good knowledge of the building site. There was some connection there he was missing, something he needed to warn Lestrade about. He shifted impatiently, reaching for the phone in his pocket with his good hand. The change in balance nearly overtoppled John, who gaped for a moment before he rearranged his features into an expression of tight, doctorly concern.

“Yes, all right,” Sherlock said, once he’d established as much space between them as there could be between two men, one of whom was about to suture the other one’s arm. “Have at it. I’m quite numb.” 

*

And yet, Sherlock found that once the moment had passed, he wanted it back.

That brief knowledge of John, not as another mind, but as a body, had been intriguing. No—compelling. Arousing, if he were honest, in a way Sherlock had thought himself unable to be aroused.

He found himself trying to recreate it when he should have been doing other things: watching John as he pulled his shoulders free of his jumper, hoping for that shiver of muscular awareness; standing too close as they bent over some piece of evidence, straining to catch the scent of John beneath his clothes; touching, even, just to feel the texture of John’s skin.

It was ridiculous.

And, predictably, a waste of time. As soon as his body began to awaken to John’s proximity, his mind would skitter off, thoughts fracturing as he tried to process sensory data that was too much, too close, and too intense.

Or worse, the door to the room in his mind where Mycroft’s coming-of-age present always waited would swing open, Sherlock tumbling awkwardly across the threshold. Unchanged by the years, that wretched gift would stand there in her high heels and little else: beautiful, slightly amused by Sherlock’s discomfort, but mostly bored. “Bit high strung, are we?” she’d ask, with professional coquettishness. “I’ll sort you out, you’ll see.” It would be days before he could climb out the swamp of shame into which those memories plunged him.

John seemed to be affected by the situation as well, as if by contagion, though Sherlock wasn’t sure who had infected whom. But he would catch John’s gaze straying from the computer screen to land on Sherlock’s collarbone, or wrists. And the tiny invasions of personal space that now punctuated their days weren’t always Sherlock’s.

It was distracting. It was intolerable.

*

He considered trying pain again, of course. It had worked so well, if briefly. But Sherlock thought John was unlikely to enjoy providing him with the levels that would be required. 

* 

“Your solution is that I have sex with you while you’re asleep?”

John, predictably, wrapped himself in a cloak of faintly comic diffidence when Sherlock laid out the plan, parroting Sherlock’s words back to him as if he were auditioning for one of those dismal comedy duos on television. The stance annoyed Sherlock. So English, so middle-class. He knew that under that dry exterior John was as tightly wound as he was himself—perhaps more so. Sometimes, he longed to shake John out of his self-containment. He wondered whether another solution to their predicament might be to punch each other silly.

They went back and forth a bit on the details, but somewhat to Sherlock’s surprise, John agreed to fuck him while he slept.

*

Sherlock calculated the chances of things going pear-shaped as being considerably higher than two to one. He might not sleep. If he slept, he might wake with a suddenness that would jar his brain into its usual patterns. He might sleep so deeply arousal would be impossible. Or John, now lying beside him in singularly unappealing pyjamas, might give up on the whole thing.

Sherlock tried to focus his mind on the breathing techniques he’d learned long ago.

But John did sleep. After a bit he simply turned away and pulled the duvet tightly around him, as self-sufficient in slumber as he was awake. Sherlock fought back an urge to strip the covers off him, to try the thing in all wakefulness, disastrous as that would certainly be.

But he forced himself to stick to the plan. He tucked the tube of lube he procured under John’s pillow and waited.

As John’s breathing evened out, his hedgehog-like curl relaxed a bit. This made the next step easier. Without turning on the light, Sherlock edged the duvet off John’s body, expecting resistance at every moment. None came. In fact, John rolled onto his back as the covering came away, as if he were glad to be released from his self-imposed protective ball. Sherlock steeled himself for the next step. He eased his fingers around the waist of John’s pyjama bottoms and began to pull them down. Sleeping skin-to-skin provided the highest probability of success, he’d reasoned.

Now John did move, in what Sherlock thought at first was an irritated way. Sherlock drew a breath in the beginning of frustration and disappointment; they’d have to abort, after all. But John, it turned out, was only wiggling a bit in what seemed to be relief. Perhaps he usually slept naked, and had only worn pyjamas in deference to their strange experiment. In any case, free of coverings, his legs splayed open, his arms, too, taking up more of the bed than Sherlock would’ve thought possible.

The familiar spell of John’s body held Sherlock motionless for a moment. His hands had grazed John’s body as he’d removed his clothing; John’s legs were more muscular than he’d expected, their covering of fine hair tickling his palms. In the near-darkness of the room, Sherlock could see the outline of John’s penis, slack against his thigh. The sight, the sensations, stirred him.

And threw him off the bed, heart pounding, mind firing in a million directions. Every neuron screamed flight, but he made himself stay in the room, pacing the length of it instead.

Sherlock would have preferred to say it was the spirit of inquiry that made him slow his respiration, shuck his pyjama bottoms and climb back into bed, but the truth had more to do with pride. He couldn’t bear the thought of admitting to John in the morning that this had all been a supremely silly idea.

But pride had its uses. And the effects of skin-to-skin contact were surely under-analyzed. Because Sherlock found, once he’d found space for himself on the bed around John’s sprawl, that through some nearly alchemical reaction, the proximity was conducive to sleep.

*

  
Perhaps the best things about the sex itself, when it happened, was how fuzzy Sherlock was on the details.

Things were clear at first. He woke to find John pressed against his back. John’s cock was a hard, hot, length sliding between Sherlock’s legs. John’s lips burrowed into the back of his neck. Then John’s fingers closed around Sherlock’s own cock, and Sherlock was caught up by things he had never paid attention to before: the rhythm of their bodies moving together; and a vast, yearning, opening towards John that was not physical at all.

When he came, it was almost as if he’d left his body behind, or at least shattered its constraints.

*

Afterwards, improbably, John fell back to sleep. Or perhaps it was probable; perhaps it was what most people did after sex. Sherlock had a data set of one, and you couldn’t make any deductions for that.

He himself felt awake and calm, the languor of his mind mirroring the languor of his limbs. His awareness of details had returned to him, however, and he tried to catalog his present sensations for later study.

He ran his eyes over John’s slumbering form. John lay on his back again, the sheet tugged up only to his waist, duvet forgotten. He snored gently. The scar on his shoulder shone livid, his usual self-consciousness about it surrendered to sleep. Sherlock reached out to touch it, expecting John, even unconscious, to flinch away. But John stayed still under his hands.

At any moment, Sherlock expect his own mental storm to reignite, to toss him back out of the warm, sticky bed into restless pacing. But that didn’t happen—residual endorphins, perhaps. He felt the same easy pleasure as he stroked his thumb across the still-present furrows in John’s brow, as he did when he ran it along the corner of his jaw. John pursed his lips, interrupted mid-snore, but didn’t wake.

Sherlock slid his hand lower. The skin of John’s belly was soft, almost fragile. Sherlock hadn’t noticed that while they were making love, and he lingered, touching John with first with tips of his fingers, then with his whole palm, committing the feel of him to memory.

His hand brushed the edge of the sheet covering John and he stopped, waited out a breath of panic. But surely John wouldn’t mind, after what they’d just done, if the tables were turned.

He moved his hand lower still.


End file.
